ars technica discusses how bandwidth caps could lead to ISPs benefiting from piracy. But they predict that the profits to be made from charging high bandwidth users a premium will also create an incentive for ISP’s to filter content suspected of copyright infringement. They also cover the recent survey results by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Internet and American Life project suggesting that the US broadband market is edging towards saturation. The study suggests that there are still significant untapped
markets for broadband – but they would require significant investments in
infrastructure or lowered prices. 14% of those surveyed said they simply couldn’t get broadband in their area. By contrast, British Telecommunications (BT) claims more than 99% of British households have access to broadband, although speeds remain an issue for those in rural areas.

Dan Brickley talks about how the recent court decision requiring Google to turn over YouTube user logs in the Viacomm infringement suit has broader privacy implications. With the Social Graph API, a new Google service, personal information from YouTube accounts that
was already public is increasingly accessible to automated processing.